My wife cringes as I swing our Mazda CX-9 into reverse to parallel park in a spot on Boylston Street.
There’s no reason for my parallel parking to make her nervous.
After all, I have a secret weapon.
Our CX-9 has a backup cam.
I always know exactly where I am.
I can choose the number of inches of clearance for the car behind me.
Every time.
As I’m pulling into the spot, our 10-month-old coughs.
“Is the baby ok?”
See, in addition to my backup cam, I have two baby mirrors.
I can see our forward-facing toddler in the mirror attached to the side of the rearview mirror.
To see the rear-facing infant I look in the bear mirror on the back seat through my rearview mirror.
Our infant is happily flailing about.
No signs of distress.
And it gets me thinking about your team.
Stress over delegated work comes from lack of information.
Are they on schedule?
What issues are they facing?
The more information you have,
- The more confident you can be when things are going well
- The faster you can take corrective action when things head off course.
Here are 3 ways to gather better information:
1. Ask
In a car, a quiet baby is more stressful than a fussy one.
That’s why we got the mirrors.
So that we can see what the kids are up to.
Especially when they are quiet.
The best time to check in with your employees
Is when you haven’t heard from them in a while.
How do you know when it’s time to check in with your employees?
2. Review
One of my clients wanted frequent updates from her sales staff.
She was asking them to prepare detailed weekly reports.
In addition to tracking all their work in SalesForce.
Now she runs her reports from SalesForce
Instead of creating more overhead for her sales team.
How can you get your information without creating additional overhead for your team?
3. Install
My franchise system just rolled out an updated computer system.
I now have a dashboard on my front page.
New customers, A/R, Current deposits, Calendar, Totals for the week…
I check it several times a day.
Which means that I know what’s happening before my team updates me.
What information do you have on your dashboard?